The 40 Years of Comics Project - Day 416: The Dodo and the Frog #92, November 1957 ("Hey Kids! Comics!" Week, Day 4)

Yet another comic about a frog who's not a very nice person. Or frog, I suppose.

I'd said that the Little Lulu comic from a couple of days ago was one of the oldest in the collection, but this one predates it by a few months. The more I think on it, the more I realize that the oldest pieces in my collection are children's comics. On the one hand I think it has to do with the condition these comics end up in (my cover for today's selection doesn't look remotely as nice as that picture above), and on the other, I think it's because, of all the genres published at the time, children's comics are amongst the least collectible of the lot.

I've decided, after reading only this one issue, which also happens to be the last issue of the series, that this is a funny animal version of the Superman-Lex Luthor relationship. Dunbar Dodo is the last of his species, living a low-key(ish) existence in....a forest somewhere, I think. Fenimore Frog is the mischievous rascal who constantly is trying to take advantage of Dunbar, and whose plots consistently go awry due to the naive goodness of Dunbar. They even have the alliterative names. While I know much of Joseph Campbell's thinking on monomyth has been mostly disproven, looking at something like this, or Superman, or even Doctor Who, I feel like there's something going on with the notion of the goodness of a lone representative of a species, the hope that if it came down to there only being one human being left in existence, the goodness in us would win out over the bad.

Of course, there's also the critique, in the form of Fenimore, of the human propensity to take advantage of someone in dire circumstances, but, again, good seems to win out. Could it be that we're actually a fairly hopeful species?

And speaking of Superman (sort of)...more tomorrow!

Edit: One other interesting thing about this comic is that there are no ads in it whatsoever. I get the suspicion that the middle pages are missing from my copy, so maybe that's where they were, but there's nothing in the rest of the issue. Even the back cover is a promo for another DC comic.